The Rose was at the San Francisco Art Institute when Young Moon’s Trevor Montgomery was a student there, albeit covered with plaster to bolster the canvas and stored behind the wall of a conference room. But be it the legend around the painting or some strange aura imbued within the work itself, something of DeFeo’s creation found its way into Montgomery’s head. Now, years later, the work comes to mind for Montgomery when reflecting on the new Young Moon album, Triggered by Sunsets.

After the loss of a close friend, Montgomery left San Francisco for New Zealand, only to land in his new home just as the pandemic was beginning. Cut off from the community he’d been hoping to join, he instead constructed a studio within an old Masonic temple and focused solely on creating new songs. His own marriage between art and life which resulted in a record, Triggered by Sunsets. The parallels to DeFeo go further. Both works offer a deep appreciation of the natural world via materials seemingly at odds with the organic plane (The Rose uses oil and mica, Young Moon digital synths). And just as DeFeo fashioned unlikely beauty from physically heavy materials, Triggered by Sunsets sees Montgomery take tragedy and isolation and process them into something brightly transcendent.

Today we have the pleasure of sharing ‘Take On Thee’, the album’s latest single and its most definitive celebration of such artistic commitment. Citing the likes of Burroughs, Baudelaire and the French new wave, Montgomery describes the track as “a shout out to poets, films, painters and artists of all sorts,” but moreover an acknowledgement of the intangible forces which drive such people. “To drugs and doing things wrong but ending up right,” as Montgomery continues. “Of falling and soaring. Embodying whatever weirdness makes you feel good and fully giving yourself over to that.”

Jay De Feo
Paint all night
Find The Rose
Within your mind
Talk real loud
Fuck real soft
Poetry
will sort you out

Triggered by Sunsets is out on the 30th June via Orindal Records and you can pre-order it now.

Cover art by Rachel Anne Duffy, layout by Jon Samuels, photos by Trevor Montgomery

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Quite how to describe Blank Panthers is definitely a challenge. Taking elements of ambient, drone, shoegaze, psychedelica and indie rock, the release consists of looped, hallucinatory soundscapes which rip up the rulebook and defy any clear label. As if not wanting to encourage too much though on the matter, opener ‘Sixes’ throws you in at the deep end. While the temptation is to grasp for threads of familiarity amidst the novel sound, the listener quickly finds that if they stop thrashing and submit to the flow, they are taken up by the current and carried along.

‘Acosta’ is more laid back, sounding like a combination of The Stone Roses and Aero Flynn, while ‘Seamagnet’ occupies the trippy end of the spectrum and ‘Krilltastica’ inches forward with a pervasive oddness, building towards a climax which only half arrives, confounding the sense of eccentricity. Closer ‘Can’t Take My Mind’ is perhaps the most accessible track on the release, with echoes of Low, Yo La Tengo and Nathan Amundson’s Rivulets.

With little respect for contemporary crazes and conventions, Skyjelly are the antidote to the saturated music scene where every semi-successful band comes with a thousand clones. Plug in your headphones, sit back and get lost in their peculiar world.

You can buy Blank Panthers now from the Skyjelly Bandcamp page.

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“This past year was pretty nightmarish for me – a grandmother whom I was very close to passed away after quick mental decay and hallucinatory visions, a dear friend attempted suicide by pill overdose, I left a long term relationship, and our original guitar player quit to form a new band.  My whole world flipped in a matter of months and all of the songs I began to write were dark, brooding, wallowing meditations in sadness – and quite frankly, I didn’t like it. So I hired a new guitar player (who became our producer/engineer, too – Dave Cerminara) and asked the band to help me write a record where I could be honest and scared and confused, but that remained upbeat with bright, happy melodies. I didn’t want to sing sad songs with sad music because depression sucks.”

This is a perfect summation of the record, fast-paced, energetic and strangely celebratory in terms of sound, yet lyrically honest and quite often dark to the point of bleak. From the laid back psychedelica of ‘Close Call (Adderall Anxiety)’ and ‘Sneakin’ Out’, to the heavy riffs of ‘Liar’ and ‘Yr House Isn’t Haunted’, the songs are shot through with a detached sense of doom, an understanding of personal weakness that obliterates any chance of sentimental hope or self-absorbed melodrama. The feeling is captured perfectly on the punky ‘Tomato Tomato’:

“Id rather suffer than recover from my daily addictions
because at least I know exactly what it is I am getting
its nice to feel like I am in control in control of something”

But that does not mean personality and humour are absent, far from it. ‘It Was Mine (the Whole Time)’ is a cheeky tale of teenage audacity (although is kind of sad if you think about it too much), ‘Sun Spits’ utilises some impressively weird descriptives (“the car crawls like a saturated centipede”) and the blackly triumphant sing-a-long refrain of ‘Thru The Night’ is hard not to love. All together now… “I made it through the night! I made it through the night!”

To put it simply, Shaky At Best is an album about people addicted to trouble, folks gripped by a love-hate relationship with chemicals and loud noises, stuck within the paradox of crippling anxiety coupled with a good-time death wish. It’s about living too hard as a way to escape thinking too hard. Sometimes ideals and bleeding hearts can’t save us, and it’s up to people like Shaky Shrines to make us feel less alone.

You can stream Shaky At Best in it’s entirety below, and buy it from Bandcamp right now.

If you like what you hear, be sure to check out Shaky Shrines’ previous releases, including a 7″ out on Velocity of Sound.

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Opener ‘Lookin for Love is a good introduction to the record, with it’s easygoing  charm and grateful lyrics backed by radiant instrumentation and peppered with psychedelic oohs and aahs reminiscent of Evangelicals. ‘Running Thangz’ is more cosmopolitan, the soundtrack to the coolest 80s crime show never written in which both the good and bad guys wear shades and leave one too many buttons undone on their shirts.

“No, I own this floor – this dance floor is my home
Paint your world the colour that’s gonna make you twirl

OoOoOoOohhh we in the same zone
trust your body leave your mind peacefully at home”

‘Baby Blue’ sounds like the more recent Damien Jurado releases, while ‘Trust’ ramps up the tropical ambience and ‘Beautiful Brian’ takes us even further afield to a cosmic paradise, opening with a sound-clip declaring “the only thing I believe up there is the UFOs.” ‘The Finest Scent’ follows the planetary theme with spacey drone before evolving into a joyful pop song that could grace any commercial radio station.

Harley Alexander makes bright music with the sharp edges removed, doped, loose-limbed pop songs, dreamy from a lack of responsibility and washed out from too much sunlight and salt water. This is the sort of music you want to listen to during those small, glorious moments when Real Life backs off to allow an elated contentedness to settle, where the smallest things give you a sense of wonder and joy.

You can buy the album now from Harley Alexander’s Bandcamp page.

P.S. the artwork is by Sophie Wonfor.

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